A friend is in need of a notebook to use for a while so I’ve pulled an old 500MHz PIII from miscellaneous parts I had lying around. There’s no money to spend on software, and he’s not the type to spend money when free alternatives are available. The machine will be used for blogging, writing, playing some media files, and general surfing.

Here’s what I’ve installed:
Firefox
Web browser. He uses this already.
Openoffice.org
A full featured office suite. Although he only needs wordprocessing, this package provides spreadsheet and presentation capabilities as well.
Truecrypt
Encryption for personal data. Truecrypt can also be run from a single executable on a USB key drive, which will secure the data he carries in his pocket.
Hamachi
A VPN application. We have a small VPN setup between friends for sharing data and storing backups.
Gaim
A universal chat client for connecting to MSN, GoogleTalk, and Yahoo! IM.
ClamWin Anti Virus
A free anti-virus scanner.
Spybot S&D
Spyware scanner and removal tool.
VLC
Cross platform media player - it works well.
mTelnet
A telnet client with ANSI graphics support for accessing our BBS. Tradewars is still a good game.
PuTTY
The ssh/sftp client for Windows. PuTTY supports tunneling when necessary too if the Hamachi network can’t be accessed.
ABC
Another Bit Torrent client. I personally use Azureus, but that requires a full Java install, which isn’t necessary for this machine.
Launchy
A tool for launching applications with a few keystrokes.
Poker Mavens Free Client
No machine in our circle of friends is complete without it now that one of us lives overseas.

2006-11-09 - Added ZoneAlarm
A great personal firewall application that gives the user good control over what applications are allowed to access the network interface.